Sign In
0 Items (
Search
Comments (16)
Suppose I decided one fine day to self-identify as a non-binary pineapple. Je suis un ananas. Mes pronoms sont Ze, Zir, Zirs et Zirself. I forgot to mention, a French pineapple.
You might understandably think I’m mentally unbalanced. But, being a kindly sort of person, you might humour me. If your young son or daughter came home from school one day claiming that they were pineapples, you would not humour them for long. Maybe five minutes, before you told them not to be silly and to go wash their hands before having something to eat and drink.
Children are suggestible but I found both as a child and as a parent that a sharp dismissive grounding retort, particularly from a dad, was usually enough to dispel unfounded anxieties and delusions. Before you knew it, little Johnny or Jill was playing happily if young or preoccupied with juvenile pursuits if older. What you don’t do is to indulge fantasies beyond a playful and indulgent few minutes. What you certainly don’t do is to affirm fantasies; unless it’s Santa Claus. Unfortunately our society, or an influential segment of it, including the political class, sees virtue in affirming dangerous and debilitating fantasies in children and teenagers.
When a child or teenager believes they have been assigned the wrong biological sex; that really they are a male with female anatomy or a female with male anatomy, then they are living a fantasy. That must be our assumption. There is a gulf of genetic difference between males and females going way beyond surface appearances. If the fantasy persists, the only reasonable conclusion is that the youngster concerned is mentally troubled and in need of professional help; help which is squarely aimed at ridding the affected youngster of their delusion and bringing them back to reality. That isn’t the prevailing zeitgeist among officialdom.
Queensland and the ACT since August 2020 and Victoria since November 2022 have laws, as has New Zealand, which ban conversion therapy practices. Such practices are commonly described as those “which seek to change or suppress a person’s sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression.” Other states are following suit or will soon. Shamefully, under (conservative Catholic?) Dominic Perrottet, the previous Coalition government in NSW was preparing to act. The new Labor government will certainly soon act.
Positively affirming fantasies from on high is bound to filter down to classrooms. Among the impressionable young it is bound to play its part in promoting a contagion of sexual-identity dysphoria; which has ultimately led, as we know, to the chemical and physical maiming of young bodies. There is no lip-sticking that pig. It is evil incarnate pure and simple. From the UK some data via the Cass Review interim report commissioned by the NHS and dated February 2022:
In the last few years, there has been a significant change in the numbers and case-mix of children and young people being referred…From a baseline of approximately 50 referrals per annum in 2009, there was a steep increase from 2014-15…in October 2020 there were 2,500 children and young people being referred per annum, 4,600 children and young people on the waiting list…this increase in referrals has been accompanied by a change in the case-mix from predominantly birth‑registered males presenting with gender incongruence from an early age, to predominantly birth‑registered females presenting with later onset of reported gender incongruence in early teen years.
From the Society for Evidence Based Gender Medicine on the closure of the Tavistock Clinic.
The Tavistock failed to collect data on puberty blockers for those under 16, refused to follow up the effects of its treatments and paid virtually no attention to other common factors such as autism, eating disorders or histories of trauma and abuse. It naively confused sexual orientation with gender identity, accepted at face value all declarations by children that they were born in the wrong body and treated all complex problems through the prism of gender.
This was reported by The Medical Republic (TMR):
Australian Professional Association for Trans Health president Dr Fiona Bisshop acknowledged that there were broader concerns around the use of puberty blockers for transgender children. “People are absolutely correct in that we don’t have long-term data [on puberty blockers for gender dysphoria], and we do need long-term data,” she told TMR.
“But you can’t collect long-term data if you don’t actually put people on puberty blockers, and it’s going to take a long time for that data to appear.”
Phew! Actually, people aren’t put on puberty blockers. By definition, children are. And, apparently, girls can begin puberty from as early as the age of eight. I’m not a medico but I would have thought that treating children who are not facing life threatening illnesses with experimental substances whose long term effect is unknown would be a no-no. Against the Hippocratic Oath, wouldn’t it be? I ask, honestly but inwardly despondently.
A report by the Daily Mail (UK) on some US data.
The number of gender reassignment surgeries being carried out on American children has risen 13-fold in the last decade, a study suggests. Researchers looked at the number of mastectomies — sometimes called ‘top surgery’ — performed on girls under 18 at a major health system in California since 2013. The operation involves surgically removing breast tissue and flattening the chest of biological girls who are trans, so they can feel aligned with their gender identity.
‘Oh Lord, make haste to save us’, has seldom seemed more apropos.
Finally, what’s at issue here? Much of the public debate is about protecting women’s sports and safe spaces. Incidentally, the men inside trans women competing against real women must have no self-respect. To be clear, this is a fight worth having. However, the underlying fight is against the normalisation of transgenderism. Leave aside the ABC and its left-green-woke fellow media travellers. Consider conservative commentators on, say, Sky News.
Whenever the pernicious effects of transgenderism are brought into view, conservative commentators inevitably fall over themselves to make sure their audience understands how fair-minded they are personally. Often they tell of having a well-regarded friend or colleague who’s transgender. Self-virtuous preening has nothing to do with young girls having their breasts cut off. Nor does it have anything to do with the sexualisation and grooming of children in public schools; with drag queen story time, or with inappropriate reading material in school libraries.
I, too, knew a transgender woman. So what? Impressionable, insecure, mentally-fragile youngsters are being preyed on in some perverted campaign by trans activists to increase their foothold in society. Got to push back hard against this. It can’t be normalised. And it is a complete irrelevancy to talk kindly about adults who for whatever reason have decided to comport themselves as though they are the opposite sex. That has nothing to do with the price of eggs.
Things are going very wrong in our Western societies. And that is putting it mildly. Treating minors (and I suggest the old standard of those aged under 21) suffering from what is clearly a mentally confused state with puberty blockers, hormones, mastectomies and penectomies, has got to be beyond the pale in civilised societies. Adults have qualified licence to make life-changing alterations to their own bodies. Though even then there is a societal duty of care; and counselling should be a prior requirement to prevent those who are mentally unbalanced from injuring themselves. Minors must be protected from undertaking irreversible life-changing procedures; not encouraged or affirmed in their mixed-up mental states.
There was a time, not so very long ago, when Christian values, common decency and common sense reigned. Memory of it is becoming fainter and fainter.
The Hippocratic Oath is dead.
See Covid “vaccine” policy.
My experience with young doctors (I regularly teach students and registrars) is that on matters gender, climate, and “Voice”, they all subscribe wholesale to the approved ABC narrative.
I regularly have discussions with them, though I suspect their indoctrination after 13 years of school and 7 of university is complete.
At least it is voluntary these days. Remember the eunuchs and castrati of our illustrious past history. Perhaps if all anaesthetics and painkillers were removed from the gender benders and vanity facelift and lip filler brigade there will be second thoughts.
I’ve just read John Whitehall’s article on Life-Altering Decisions and the Adolescent Brain. We are exhorted, on pain of professional and social ostracism, to accept the science on climate catastrophism. It’s bizarre that, in contrast, the science reviewed by Whitehall is not only ignored, often with catastrophic consequences for children, by many medical practitioners, bureaucrats and politicians, when “gender affirmation” is mentioned, but acceptance of it is banned. Imagine, if you can, criminalising the application of the precautionary principle to proposed action with possible environmental impacts. Schizophrenia must be grossly undiagnosed in a surprisingly wide segment of the population in the first decades of the 21st century.
This is an argument I have often used in debates on Transgenderism. No-one ever responds.
The concept of surgically removing parts of the body so a child who identifies as a pirate can be more ‘real’ is horrendous and yet too many accept the same ghastly deformities inflicted on children in the name of gender dysphoria.
How many parents would say to a child who believes they can fly, sure, here’s a ladder, get up on the roof and fly my love?
We do seem to live in an age of insanity.
Well put!
April 10, 2023
Another useful article from Peter Smith, with some very good points (such as that men competing against women have no self-respect).
But why is it permissible to “affirm” the “fantasy” of Santa Claus? Why is that the one lie which is fine–even good and necessary–to tell to one’s children? Especially considering that Santa Claus is elevated to the god-like status of one who sees and knows everything, and rewards good and evil, at a season which is supposed to be dedicated to the One Who DID come to earth as God in the flesh?
Because children believing in Santa Claus does not make them want to become Santa Claus. And few parents today do the joke that you get gifts if you are good and potatoes if you are bad. Santa Claus is fun and children have fund while they believe. Ditto for Easter Bunny.
Telling children that something exists when it does not is still a lie. My mother did not spoil my little sister’s innocent belief in fairies; she let her come to the realization, herself, that they did not exist. What she did not do was tell my little sister that they WERE real, any more than she told her that Cinderella or Mickey Mouse were real.
What your mother could not do is prove fairies were not real. Fact is a belief in fairies is ancient and there is much about this world we do not know.
There are lots of lies in life and more often we tell ourselves lies. Sometimes a lie is compassionate.
A child is being treated for a serious disease which the doctors believe will be terminal. Do you tell the child that ‘truth’ or do you tell them something others would call a lie?
It is not that simple and Santa Claus and the Tooth Fairy and Easter Bunny relate to a child’s imagination and do no harm.
Perhaps it’s the athiestic factual child rearing way with no fantasies allowed, that’s causing so much anxiety and mental grief to children If you lose the opportunity to realise that something meaningful to you was a fantasy and maybe ritualistic, then you might not gain a robust ability to differentiate your own fanties and realities. Belief in only a bland factual world is like music played with no dynamics.
Well said. Children need fantasy and make-believe to exercise their imagination and develop brain function. I have yet to meet anyone who never forgave their parents for telling them to believe in Santa Claus, the tooth fairy, Easter Bunny. Who among us is wounded by that fantasy?
None of which justifies a parent’s bold-faced lying to his child–telling him that something is real when he KNOWS it is not. Fantasy and make-believe are fun, and I do not think that children should have all their imaginings smashed with the greater knowledge of the adult world (I used to wonder if my dolls were real, after all)–but lying is quite another matter. If there is such a justification as compassionate lying (which I doubt), telling tales to a child for the sake of fun hardly seems to fit the description.
And I cannot fathom how it is atheistic to say that it is wrong to create a web of lies (“Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with his neighbour.” Ephesians 4:25) that places the emphasis on a pseudo god, during a season that is supposed to remind us of Jesus–“the way, the truth, and the life.” (John 14:6). Could an awakening from such fantasies, rather than strengthening a child, instead possibly make him wonder if the Bible stories his parents told him were also fabricated?
Let’s face some facts. This whole bloody thing is a fad, especially amongst adolescent girls. It’s the ‘in thing’. Some parents need to remember, if they ever knew, that they are there to guide and govern; not to encourage their kids in their dangerous delusions and certainly not to let kids set the agenda.
When I was a kid growing up in the 50’s and 60’s, I would often hear the line, ‘You can be anything you want ‘. What it meant then is not what it means today. We are living in a mass culture of delusional and irrational self invention. And I’m not 70 years old, I’m 18. Because I said so.
They upended the seven vices and seven virtues. So what was next – reverse whatever is ordinary, whatever is normal. Turn marriage inside out, subsidised care to seprate mothers and infants, adults play-act reversal of biology using children as pawns.
Language butchery is the giveaway. Planned parenthood means plan to not be a parent. Dying with dignity used to mean dying with your boots on, now it’s in fashionable fluffy slippers. Conversion therapy doesn’t mean actual surgical conversion of physical and hormonal characteristics.
It is long past dark in our culture and we are living in the final stages of cultural collapse. I don’t know why anyone should be surprised that this is so, for it is a fundamental truth that we will surely reap what we have sown.
What we are now reaping is the fruit of abandoning our traditional values and heritage in allowing the great social institutions of our culture – the Universities, the Public Services and Parliaments, the Churches, the Courts of Law, and the Media – to be colonised and taken captive by the forces of darkness.
The Church of the 1970s-1990s was surely well described as the era of “beige Christianity”. Our theology was deconstructed so as to minimise the possibility of anyone taking offence, with the gospel being reduced to a collection of wishy washy offerings with which no-one could possibly take offence. The gospel promised everything and demanded nothing.
This was all meant to make newcomers feel “comfortable”; the emphasis was on blending in, and affirming, rather than challenging. If anything challenging were to be offered up at all, it would be on “safe” issues such as protecting the environment; not being judgemental or intolerant of anyone; not holding to our faith too positively in case it caused offence to unbelievers or those of another faith. There was to be no such thing as right or wrong; everything was permitted within the limits that were being defined by the world’s cultural warriors.
in order to navigate one’s way through this brave new world, a new lexicon emerged, itself a strident signal of the changing times.
“Women’s Liberation” became the term used to describe the economic conscription of women into the workforce and away from caring for their homes and children.
“Pro-Choice” was the term devised to describe infanticide.
“Feminism” was the expression used to describe the masculinisation of women.
“Marriage Equality” was understood to mean marriage between sodomites and between lesbians.
“Inclusiveness” meant the exclusion of those holding views inconsistent with the new cultural paradigm;
“Diversity” was re-interpreted to mean rigid conformity to the new social norms; and
“Tolerance” meant intolerance of any views other than those of the new culture.
In fact, anyone not subscribing to the new paradigm of “tolerance”, “diversity” and “inclusiveness” were “bigots”, “misogynists”, “racists” and guilty of “toxic masculinity”, “hate speech” or something equally obnoxious, deserving deprivation of social standing and even membership of the human race.
These social developments of the last forty years are all manifestations of cultural collapse; this is particularly so when transgender mania, the explosion of gender identities, occurs. The fascination with the androgynous generally occurs in the late stages of cultural collapse; as for example, in ancient Rome and, more recently, in the Weimar republic in Germany, and France in the 1920’s and 1930’s. Even the Church today has forgotten that upholding God’s Word is the only way to uphold the culture that was established upon that Word.